Despite the mobile phone being our most personal electronics device, there are many unanswered questions when it comes to mobile social gaming

For example, the massive increase in the number of games using social networking links to tweet scores or spam' friends Facebook pages has divided the opinions of consumers and developers. Or, more fundamentally, why are we still relying such non-mobile solutions?

Robert Unsworth, vice president, global sales and business development at Digital Chocolate, stated the issue well in the MGF social panel discussion.

"Social is a lot more problematic [on mobile] than the online world," he said.

"We haven't seen the silver bullet solution yet. One of the problems is that the social eco-system is very game-centric. We currently turn the international model on its head - the social element is particular to a game, and not the whole system."

Marc Gumpinger, CEO of Scoreloop, agreed; "It's a different application on mobile devices than it is on the web."

"The app stores aren't very social. Scoreloop is placed as a Game Center across platforms. That's a powerful way to solve the problem for the end user and publisher"

Look East young man

Keith Katz, veep of Monetisation at rival social platform OpenFeint picked the example of social networks in Japan as an example of how mobiles have become integrated successfully in with social networking,

"They have these amazing eco-systems built around games. But I'm not sure if you dropped that same model into Europe or US right now it would work," he warned.

Scott Seaborn, head of mobile technologies at Ogilvy Group, suggested it was the problem unique to the post-Halo era, "Games became very interesting for us as they've become the new films. How do we make that more interesting?"

"A lot of [how to make it more interesting] is down to the format of the device. When we think about the unique elements of mobile devices and include that in our games, instead of just borrowing from past mediums and tagging it on, then it'll get a lot more interesting."

Think global, act local

Seaborn used the examples of top brands and titles that use elements unique to mobiles to help enchance the social experience,

"Coke Zero did a bike game in the real world using GPS for Tron. That was marginally more interesting, but we're still learning," he said.

Unsworth remained philosophical. "As humans we latch onto what we've done in the past. We assume gaming on mobile is just a platform, so we take the game and try and leverage it into a mobile device.

"What we don't do is invert this. We should be approaching the mobile device as a connected social computer, and not as a mini-gaming console. Leveraging things like GPS, customer's address book, the permanent connection - there's a huge amount of things that are in there. As an industry we need to look at that."

In his opinion, the big issue once again was one of fragmentation. "Features such as GPS or leveraging a camera, they're not ubiquitous across devices. We're constrained by technology, but history proves innovation flourishes from those constraints."

I listened for 44 minutes

Mikko Alasaarela, founder & CEO of developer Vivio, pointed to good current examples however - notably Canabalt's Twitter integration - as a good way of encouraging friends to learn about the game.

Hence, despite the number of issues developers face when attempting to fully integrate social features into games, there were plenty of ideas as to new ways of getting the most out of the mobile's position, with Seaborn suggesting, "You could have a game where your mates can tweet into your game."

"There's a lot more you can do than just opening up a social network and spamming people with your score."

Marc Gumpinger concluded the debate on a positive note, highlighting the fact that the current fragmented position will "spark creativity" from developers as they attempt to overcome this aspect of the industry.